How To Finally Make Twitter Work For You

I am thrilled to have this guestpost from Lane Vance (@lanevance) today , who runs a great Social Media blog. More about him at the bottom of the post.

Twitter is NOT easy! At least that is what I used to think when I first discovered what Twitter meant for me. This is what I learnt whilst trying to develop my profile for personal and professional growth. I found I could easily spend the majority of my day focusing on nothing but Twitter.

That involved finding content, reading tweets, tweeting my finds and sending RTs. While this was effective at starting to build my reputation it was painful, time consuming and I knew it was not sustainable.

I started experimenting with several different services trying to find the perfect combination. The key goal was to find something that would help me manage my feed while freeing up time to have meaningful interactions with my Twitter friends and get my in-real-life work done as well.

While some services showed promise they either didn’t pan out or they were broken more often than not. It forced me to spend more time troubleshooting, fixing, or moving between services.

Needless to say I was not enjoying my Twitter experience! I was working for Twitter rather than it working for me and I knew I had to find a better way. That’s when I discovered Buffer.

What Can I Do Differently Now?

Buffer truly changed my Twitter experience and has allowed me to interact with my tweeps rather than spending endless hours finding and timing tweets. It has also allowed me to stop babysitting services to make sure they are working or dealing with their inane requirements and limitations.

Buffer is better than any other web service I have found because it quite simply fills in the gaps and does not get in my way. Let me tell you how:

FLEXIBILITY

Being able to define the specific days and times you want to tweet allows you to have complete control over when you communicate to your followers. No other tool that I have found gives you this flexibility especially when you take into account the number of ways you can add items to your Buffer.

CAPACITY

Being able to load up your queue with 10 or more tweets puts you in control of your Twitter feed rather than being a slave to it.

CONTROL

I can now choose what is being tweeted on my account. Terrible headline? That’s fine, either highlight the text you want to include in your tweet before you click your Buffer bookmarklet or just edit it before or after you add it to the queue. So simple!

CONVENIENCE

I can now find and schedule content whenever I have time during the day. I’m not tied to the computer waiting for the next action to happen in 30 minutes. As long as I keep something in my buffer I know it will be shared when I want it to be.

RELIABILITY

The service is simply reliable. When I have had a question or issue both Leo and Joel have responded promptly with great information. You can tell they care about their users!

KLOUT

Using Buffer has also allowed me to steadily build on my Klout score. Love it or hate it, in today’s world of social media that number can be important.

By allowing me to keep a steady flow of great content and freeing my time to have meaningful interactions with my Twitter buddies I have seen a consistent increase in my Klout score over the past couple months.

At the end of the day, the reason to be on Twitter is for the personal interactions. It is, after all, a social network. Don’t get bogged down by the dread of finding a way to keep up. Let Buffer do the heavy lifting for you and put Twitter to work for you!

How have you put Twitter to work for you?

Lane Vance tweets (@lanevance) and blogs (http://www.lanevance.com) about technology, social media, online safety/security, WordPress, and web performance. Hit him up anytime, he is a great guy!

If you would like to write a blogpost about Social Media, Twitter or your Buffer experience, email me leo @ bufferapp.com.

Peter, thanks for the great comment. Yes, that is very interesting to hear, if you are on a tight schedule, we will always have the Tweets coming out for you! 🙂

Anonymous

Twitter can be a giant time suck if you don’t manage it properly and use all of the tools at your disposal. A lot of people use Twitter to announce their every thought and feeling and activity and to post dozens of links per day so it can be a monumental time drain if you try and follow along with everything in real time. There are all kinds of tools to manage your Twitter workload and make tasks more efficient (unfollowing non-tweeters for instance. There are also lots of companies mentioned at http://buyfacebookfansreviews.com that also sell Twitter followers and can have a positive impact there, though I also think that going for a quality over quantity approach can also work well in the long run and interacting with people that believe in you can be very rewarding. I work best in batch mode because my brain doesn’t multi-task well so I think that finding all kinds of tools that can do stuff like BufferApp does can help save you time and make you happier in the long run.

Anita

Hello Lane, thank you so much for this post. It’s a great one! I’m Tweeter noobie and I spet so much time finding content, reading tweets, tweeting my finds and sending RTs. Not to mention that I’m still learning and finding my way on Tweeter. It can be overwhelming sometimes although I’m a multi-task woman. It’s quite a challange to “dance” with only 140 characters too…:)

Have a great day and all the best!

Anita

CLB

Couldn’t have said it any better. Buffer was a great find for me too! Thanks for sharing — I’ll definitely being reposting! ~ CLB

Marta Tome

Hi, thanks so much, I spent hours all the days posting, reading, answers,…. you bring me what I want.

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